Can You Ever Be Too Cynical About The US Media?

Ross Douthat says he was mistaken to predict earlier this year that the new pope wouldn’t be able to do much to turn around the Catholic Church’s image. But:

More important, I was entirely wrong about the Vatican’s image being inextricably tied to the legacy of the sex-abuse crisis. To date, the new pope has done much less than the underappreciated Benedict on that front, but nobody in the Western press seems to care: even as American bishops continue to mishandle abuse cases, Francis’s blend of charisma, asceticism and inclusivity have been sufficient to reverse a decade of bad press for Catholicism.

In a way, I’m grateful to have been wrong, since the message and mission of the church deserve as much attention as the continuing blindness of some bishops. But that blindness still needs to be addressed, and it’s troubling, and telling, that the media would give a more liberal-seeming pope a pass on an issue they hammered his predecessor on at every opportunity. And if I’d been just a little more cynical about these things, I probably would have seen it coming.

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20 Responses to Can You Ever Be Too Cynical About The US Media?

It may somehow be possible, but I’m unaware of exactly how. The Murdoch media empire and the right-wing internet echo chamber is entirely predictable, and the Establishment consensus of the New England liberals is largely likewise. Reading more than a tiny amount of either on broad topics (just to keep current) is actually a way to decrease one’s total knowledge, awareness, and accuracy.

Well, the sex abuse thing is an old story. Folks are getting tired of it unless a new angle appears. The media is perfectly willing to give the Pope a pass on things as long as he does not say anything to upset them, and so far he has not. On the contrary, he is playing them very well and the stuff that might upset the media has been so in-house that they do not deem it newsworthy.

Much of the story with Pope Francis is that the media and much of the RCC’s observers were deathly tired of the JP2/Benedict thing and its storyline. The conservative mode of trying to rescue the RCC was clearly in foundering. They met the RCC resorting to trying the liberal-ish mode with a photogenic and nice old man to front it mostly with a kind of relief.

Bergoglio’s election was the opportunity for a lot of latent benefit of the doubt for the RCC to consolidate and emerge.

It has emerged and Pope Francis has been quick to use it. The present is a giddy time with lots of feel-good sentiment and relief coming forth about the RCC. As George W Bush and Barack Obama have found out in American government, tapping into a freshly emerged benefit of the doubt is politically wonderful. Thing is, it starts to diminish as soon as it gets exposed to full sunlight. And when it’s gone, it’s gone. The present public goodwill may last a year for Pope Francis, or last five. Who knows, maybe even ten. But it’s not infinite. When it’s spent there is no more to be obtained mining this particular vein.

Just today I’ve been reading the recent New Yorker profile of Pope Francis by James Carroll. The mans’s fascinating and complex, but really: He drives a Ford Focus and washes the feet of real prisoners instead of cardinals. Whatever you think of the theology, and the modal reporter doesn’t think of it at all, this pope’s a great story.

(half-remembered and probably mangled quote from the New Yorker piece: “If it’s just for show, he should keep up the show.”)

The important thing to remember about the media is that the bulk, the overwhelming bulk of their audience is not Roman Catholic and really could not care less about the Catholic Church or the Pope. It has no impact on their daily lives except when it annoys them by spouting nonsense about birth control. So, for there to be any coverage it has to be something that will interest the wide audience they are aiming for. That means scandal, the juicier the better, or at least something they can understand, the Pope doing something out of the ordinary enough to be worthy of notice. Which Cardinal is getting which job or is being fired from an old one is a “What? Who? Who cares!” kind of story from that perspective.

Now if a member of the Swiss Guards were to go berserk and shoot up the Curia, that would be a story worth covering.

As I keep pointing out, Francis has been accused of being complicit in Argentina’s “Dirty War”, so all of his actions thus far have served as a PR campaign. Dealing with sex abuse doesn’t serve that end.

As I kept saying during the conclave to every right wing American Catholic (or not) that prayed for a third-world pope, you have no idea what you are asking for, and you probably won’t like it if you get it.

What most First Things type Catholics knew about the third word church(s) is that they were very vocal against homosexuality, and that was all they cared to find out. Actually, even about that they were mostly wrong. A strong opposition is probably true only in Africa (a place I don’t know, so i go, like them, from the published news)

Homosexuality, like other sexual sins are not that high in the Latin American church(s) priorities. On the other hand, the Catholic church in Latin America in the last forty years or so is at the forefront or the “other” social issues: poverty, inequality, protection to those left behind by the radical changes that capitalism and globalization has brought on, even the environment. Those are the themes a third word pope will stress (and so far, Francis is acting unexceptionally if seen from a Latin American church prism).

Also, as Hispanics and new immigrants become more and more a presence inside the Catholic Church in the US, be warned aware that the Church here will also migrate its emphasis from the cultural/sexual issues that seem so dominant today, to more (way more) traditionally liberal issues. You can see it already in the Southwest, where the Church has been at the forefront of protecting and helping immigrants (legal or otherwise)

I think that the media’s uncritical fawning over Pope Francis is of a piece with their uncritical piling-on over Phil Robertson. They make up their minds on a narrative and they run with it, facts or context be damned.

You make some very good points. The Catholic Church in Latin America is, as far as I can tell, more favourable to the left than in North America, and more considered about economic issues. that’s to be expected, it reflects public opinion in Latin America.

Sexual morality issues aren’t at the core of what political debates in Latin America revolve around, but as far as I can tell, Latin American public opinion and cultural values surrounding sex and gender issues are more conservative than us in some regards, and not in others. more conservative, specifically, about abortion, fertility and gender norms, and comparable to North America in terms of tolerance towards homosexuality, premarital sex, extramarital sex, etc.. This is not the uniformly culturally conservative region some would have you believe.

Ross is forgetting is the media gets bored of a narrative and can go “Squirrel!” at a moment’s notice. The Church scandal is old news that really to the average person has no substantial updates in years. Then elect in a new Pope with a change in direction of the “God’s Love and Mercy” first the media is all over it. This explains a lot of narratives in history.

Secondly, Pope Benedict was theologian than an engaged Pope of the people. The Catholic Church and religion needed someone to improve the image to the modern world.

Douthat elides over the fact that Joseph Ratzinger was *himself* guilty of shuffling predatory child rapists around to find fresh victims when he was Cardinal of Munich. Also, he led the investigatory arm of the church for two decades when all of this was unfolding.

If it came to light that Pope Francis did what Pope Benedict did, he’d be raked over the coals as well.

That said, I really hope that Francis boots Cardinal Law out of Santa Maria Maggiore…

I would say that the combination of the sex abuse crisis with a judgmental, finger-pointing, these are the sins, you are not worthy to receive communion etc. mentality in the Catholic hierarchy highlighted hypocrisy. As in, we allowed sex abuse to take place in order to protect our institution, but now what we have to say to everyone is that we are going to call out everyone else for their sins, especially the sins that we choose to emphasize the most. I know that the church also talked about other things and the media played certain things up, but really the bishops did go on and on about the big 3 sin issues. It was demoralizing and hypocritical. So Pope Francis’ change of tone to mercy, humility and inclusion does buy him a pass for a while in terms of less hypocrisy. I believe and hope he will be addressing the sex abuse crisis in days to come.

I honestly don’t see where the Catholic Church has become more respectable because of the Pope. Obviously no one who matters has any respect for its American heirarchy, they are still just an annoying joke and not worth wasting serious airtime on. The teachings of the Church certainly have not become respectable in any way because of the Pope, in fact when he ventured into the area of economics he got hammered. No one is going to stop using birth control because he washes the feet of some loser in Rome.

So while the media will be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, it is probably also waiting to see him fall off the bicycle and then nail his hide to the wall.

I agree with @Bruce Ross. The press is enamored with Pope Francis because he is a great story. It is like The Shoes of the Fisherman is being played out in real time. Here is a great story… The pope resigns because of old age shocking the world. A prelate from the ends of the world who is seen as a spent force and nearing retirement goes to Rome to elect a new pope. Despite not being on anyone’s radar, he is elected pope and sets about dramatically changing things in the Church. He drastically decreases the monarchical pomp surrounding the papacy and makes himself readily available to his flock. Cute comedy scenes include stunned people getting phone calls from the pope, the pope driving through the Vatican gardens in a stick shift beater, and tourists bumping into the pope walking around Rome incognito. The Curia and other evil forces who were stunned by the pope’s election strike back. (Some of these guys look like typecast villains.) There is an ongoing battle between the good guys led by the pope and the bad guys who include the Mafia. That sounds like a great Hollywood script.. except it is all real.

No, you can’t ever be too cynical about the U.S. media. That includes Fox News. It includes the New York Times. And it includes Ross Douthat, who is quite as prone to overlay his subject matter (in this case, Pope Francis) with his own angst, as any other media personality.

For sure, Rod Dreher has certain bedrock underlying assumptions that he takes as axiomatic, and one cannot trust those as Truth when posting comments here. But most of us make such assumptions, and on a good day, one or several of us may be right, including our gracious host.

Rod is quite even-handed about posting contrary viewpoints, and its much easier to post a dissenting opinion here than in the letters page of the New York Times, or for that matter in a Fox News broadcast.